Preliminary benchmarks put Intel HD 4000 up to 84 percent faster than HD 3000
Although still months away, Intel’s highly anticipated Ivy Bridge platform has purportedly already been leaked online in the form of early benchmarks and performance analyses. Or, more specifically, the chipset’s integrated Intel HD 4000 GPU has been put into some real-world gaming tests.
According to cpu-world.com, Chinese website www.expreview.com was able to grab hold of an unlocked Ivy Bridge i5-3570K desktop CPU with integrated HD 4000 graphics and compared it to the gaming performance of a current-gen Sandy Bridge i5-2500K with integrated HD 3000 graphics. In their tests, the third generation Core i CPU swept the floor on all benchmarks, be it gaming or synthetic.
For example, at a video resolution of 1280x720 pixels, the HD 4000 was able to provide a 30 percent boost in frame rate performance in Starcraft 2 and an even larger 84 percent in the FPS Far Cry 2 compared to the Core i5-2500K. In 3DMark Vantage, the source claims an almost 89 percent higher GPU score from the 22nm microarchitecture.
As expected, real-world performance gains from the HD 3000 successor will be highly dependent on the software at hand. But, with supposed average improvements of about 50 percent, the HD 4000 is looking quite promising for even better gaming on-the-go for future ultrathin Ultrabooks based on the Ivy Bridge chipset.